Edward Feser's Blog, page 68

Mired in the roiling tar pits of lust

As I note in my essay on the perverted faculty argument, not all deliberate frustrations of a natural faculty are gravely immoral.  For example, lying involves the frustration of a natural faculty and thus is wrong, but it is usually only venially sinful.  So what makes the perversion of a faculty seriously wrong?  In particular, why have traditional natural law theorists and Catholic moral theologians regarded the perversion of our sexual faculties as seriously wrong?  (The discussion that follows presupposes that you’ve read the essay just referred to – please don’t waste time raising objections in the combox unless you’ve done so.)In a post from a couple of years ago I discussed three aspects of sex which give it a unique moral significance: it is the means by which new people are made; it is the means by which we are completed qua men and women; and it is the area of life in which the animal side of our nature most relentlessly struggles against the rational side.  In a follow-up post I elaborated upon this last point, spelling out Aquinas’s account of the deleterious effects of sexual vice on the intellect and the will.

The nature of sexual pleasure featured prominently in that account, and it is key to understanding why natural law theorists and moral theologians regard the perversion of our sexual faculties as an inherently serious matter.  For sexual pleasure is dangerous stuff.  That is by no means to say that it is bad; on the contrary, it is very good.  Rather, it is dangerous in the way that alcohol, or gasoline, or knives, or many other perfectly innocent everyday things are dangerous.  There is nothing wrong with enjoying it, any more than there is anything wrong with using these other things.  But as with these other things, you need to be careful with it and indulge in it only at the right time and in the right way.
The source of the danger is its uniquely intense and enthralling character.  Aquinas describes lust, by which he means disordered sexual desire, as concerned with “the greatest of pleasures… [which] absorb the mind more than any others” (Summa Theologiae II-II.46.3).  Now, sexual pleasure needs to be very intense and absorbing if sex is to fulfill its procreative and unitive ends.  Sex is fundamentally about other people.  In particular, it is about the new people you bring into being by way of sex, and it is about the person with whom you bring those new people into being.  In the nature of the case, these are people you need to be on intimate terms with for a long time, sharing a household with them and taking responsibility for them.  That is demanding and difficult, and thus something which, all things being equal, we would naturally seek to avoid.
The reason most people don’t avoid it is, of course, because of the very strong allure of sex.  A person becomes sexually attracted to another person, the couple’s sexual relations are extremely pleasant and tend to foster strong affection between them, and the children that result from these relations thereby have both a mother and a father to provide for them materially and spiritually.  Needless to say, this basic pattern is very common in everyday human life.  Equally needless to say, it also very often does not go nearly as tidily as that little summary implies.  People have fleeting sexual relationships too, they contracept or abort, they get bored and divorce, and so on.  The point, though, is that the many child-producing and stable monogamous relationships that do occur wouldn’t occur very often or at all if it weren’t for the strong allure of sex, which gets the whole process going and to some extent keeps it going.
The delight we take in sexual relations is intended by nature to function as a kind of emotional superglue.  Sexual desire is meant to direct people out of themselves and their personal interests and to seek completion in another person, and sexual pleasure is meant to bond a person tightly with that other person once he or she is found.  Like literal superglue, it doesn’t always succeed, but this binding function is still its point, its final cause.  And like literal superglue, if it gets applied in the wrong way there will be serious problems.  It will “bond” you to the wrong thing or at the wrong time (where what counts as “wrong” according to natural law theory is spelled out in the essay on the perverted faculty argument linked to above). 
An obvious way in which this is so would be in the context of fornication or adultery.  The pleasure of sex will in these cases tend to enmesh one in situations that are not conducive to the well-being of the children that might result.  But the sexual faculties themselves are not necessarily perverted in these cases – the essential immorality of fornication and adultery derives from other considerations – to they are a bit tangential to our main interest here (though I’ll return to the topic of fornication later on).
A more relevant example would be masturbation, which has traditionally been considered immoral in many cultures but which modern Westerners typically regard as unproblematic (though interestingly, expressions like “jack-off” and “wanker” retain their force as terms of abuse, conveying the idea of something shameful and pathetic).  Why is this particular perversion of the faculty considered seriouslydisordered by natural law theory and Catholic moral theology?  What’s the big deal? 
The big deal is that masturbation essentially takes something that is intended by nature to be strongly other-oriented and makes of it something strongly self-orientedinstead.  Accordingly, it is about as “perverse” in the relevant sense – that is to say, in the sense of using a human faculty while at the same time actively frustrating its teleology – as an act could be.  (I’m only addressing the nature of the act itself here, by the way.  Culpability for the act, which concerns a person’s knowledge, maturity, psychological state, force of habit, etc. is, as all moral theologians emphasize, a trickier question, and I am not talking about that right now.)
Hence, suppose someone masturbates while fantasizing about people other than his or her spouse.  The pleasure experienced in that case will have a tendency to “glue” the person’s sexual inclinations to these objects of imagination, which makes it more difficult for them to be “glued” in the same way to the real flesh and blood spouse.  The person’s sexual thoughts and feelings will to some extent become habitually “directed toward” fantasy partners rather than the spouse. 
Or suppose that someone masturbates while fantasizing about some sexual act which is for independent reasons immoral.  The pleasure experienced in that case will have a tendency to “glue” the person’s sexual sensibilities to that sort of act, which will make it more difficult for him to find pleasure in morally licit sexual acts.  His sexual thoughts and feelings will become habitually “directed toward” these illicit acts as much as or more than toward licit acts. 
Then there is the fact that in an interpersonal context, lovers have to adjust their needs and expectations to one another.  For example, a more adventurous or amorous person will have to moderate his desires somewhat, whereas a more conservative or reserved person will have to loosen up a bit.  In this and other ways, the partners will, when things go well, find a happy medium and complement one another.  But masturbation in which a person fantasizes about people or circumstances which do not put such limits on one’s desires will tend to have the opposite effect.  It will make it much more difficult for the person to tolerate the real world conditions that would otherwise mold his desires in a more realistic direction.  As C. S. Lewis once put the point in a letter to a reader:
[T]he real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another… and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.  And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.  For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival.  Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity.
End quote.  Modern pornography greatly exacerbates the problem, in two respects.  First, insofar as it involves images of real people doing real things, it intensifies the vividness of onanistic sexual fantasy and the sexual pleasure experienced in it.  Second, the variety of sexual acts displayed, the bodily perfection of the performers, the promiscuity they exhibit, etc. further disconnect fantasy from what real partners are likely to want or expect sexually.  The user thus becomes more firmly “glued” onto unrealistic expectations, illicit sexual acts, etc., and thus less capable of finding satisfaction in a normal sexual relationship with a real person.    
Furthermore, the more that taking sexual pleasure in unrealistic and illicit fantasy objects rather than in a real person becomes “second nature,” the more likely a person is to lose even an understanding of – let alone a desire for – what really is natural (in the natural law theory sense of “natural”) where sex is concerned.  Natural feelings of revulsion at certain illicit acts will weaken, as will the desire and capacity for thinking objectively about the morality of acts that one has come to be strongly attracted to.  As sociologist Mark Regnerus has suggested, contemporary pornography, which is historically unprecedented in its prevalence and in the extremeness of its content, has plausibly played a key role in the liberalization of attitudes about sexual morality. 
This is an instance of what Aquinas calls “blindness of mind,” which on his account is one of the byproducts of sexual vice and which I discussed in an earlier post.  Our “pornified”popular culture, which is hypersexualized even apart from outright pornography, has made of this particular kind of “blindness” a mass phenomenon.  Millions upon millions of human beings have in effect become psychologically “glued” to sexual attitudes and behaviors of a greater or lesser degree of immorality.  Modern Western society is like Plato’s Cave, only with lewd images rather than flickering shadows endlessly playing across the walls.  Or to change metaphors, it is like a vast herd of Pleistocene fauna mired in tar pits of disordered sexual pleasure.
This mass blindness in turn facilitates other kinds of grave sexual immorality – which brings us back to fornication.  Millions of children today are trapped in poverty because of illegitimacy.  Millions more are aborted.  In short, widespread fornication leads to lots of poor children and lots of dead children.  Neither poverty nor abortion would be nearly as common as they are if fornication and the hypersexualized pop culture that facilitates it were stigmatized the way they once were. 
Now, modern people are hardly reluctant to stigmatize things – cigarette smoking, politically incorrect language, etc.  They are also highly sentimental about children.  Yet they would never dream of stigmatizing fornication and oversexualized pop culture for the sake of the well-being of children.  Indeed, they are so attached to the stupid cliché that what one does in the bedroom has no effect on anyone else that they have great difficulty seeing what, for most human beings historically, has been blindingly obvious – that sexual immorality in fact has a massive effect precisely on these weakest members of society. 
Thus does sex, which has as its natural end the generation and rearing of children, now regularly lead by way of illegitimacy and abortion to the impoverishment and murderof children. 
Now that is perverse.  And it is testimony to the power of sexual pleasure to cause grave harm when not indulged in in the right way and at the right time. 
Not that there aren’t even worse consequences still – though they have to do with tar pits of the sort you’re more likely to see in Dante than at La Brea.

Foundations of sexual morality

The foundations of traditional sexual morality, like the foundations of all morality, are to be found in classical natural law theory.  I set out the basic lines of argument in my essay “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument,” which appears in my book Neo-Scholastic Essays .  The title notwithstanding, the perverted faculty argument is by no means the whole of the natural law understanding of sexual morality, but only a part.  It is an important and unjustly maligned part of it, however, as I show in the essay.  Along the way I criticize purported alternative approaches to defending traditional sexual morality, such as the so-called “New Natural Law Theory.”  Anyway, you can now read the essay online.  After you’ve done so, you might follow up with some other things I’ve written on the subject of sexual morality.

Science, computers, and Aristotle

If you think that the brain, or the genome, or the universe as a whole is a kind of computer, then you are really an Aristotelian whether you realize it or not.  For information, algorithms, software, and other computational notions can intelligibly be applied within physics, biology, and neuroscience only if an Aristotelian philosophy of nature is correct.  So I argue in my paper “From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature,” which appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Nova et Vetera .  You can now read the paper online.

Immaterial thought and embodied cognition

In a combox remark on my recent post about James Ross’s argument for the immateriality of thought, reader Red raises an important set of issues:
Given embodied cognition, aren't these types of arguments from abstract concepts and Aristotelian metaphysics hugely undermined?  In their book Philosophy in the Flesh Lakoff and Johnson argue that abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
End quote.  In fact, none of this undermines Ross’s argument at all, but I imagine other readers have had similar thoughts, and it is worthwhile addressing how these considerations do relate to the picture of the mind defended by Ross and by Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers generally.Note first that metaphor doesn’t affect Ross’s point about the determinacy of thought in the slightest.  Recall that to say that a thought is “determinate” in the sense Ross, Quine, Kripke, et al. have in mind is to say that there is a fact of the matterabout whether it has one rather than another among a possible range of meanings.  To use Quine’s famous example, if I have the thought that gavagai, that thought will be determinate in the relevant sense if there is a fact of the matter about whether it has the content that there is a rabbit over there as opposed to the content that there is an undetached rabbit part over there or the content that there is a temporal stage of a rabbit over there.  Now, whether I am using gavagai metaphorically is irrelevant.  For example, suppose I am pointing to a human being as I have the thought.  If the thought has a determinate content, then there will be a fact of the matter about whether I am describing the person metaphorically as a rabbit, or as an undetached rabbit part, or as a temporal stage of a rabbit.  In short, to say that a linguistic utterance or thought is determinate in the relevant sense doesn’t entail that it is not metaphorical.

Second, though there is, accordingly, no need to get into a discussion of Lakoff and Johnson’s claims about metaphor in order to defend Ross, it should be noted briefly that it would be a serious mistake to suppose that anyone who endorses Ross’s claim that a linguistic utterance or thought can have a determinate meaning must be committed to a simplistic account of language that ignores the rich and complex ways that the meanings of words can be extended.  On the contrary, the crucial role that the analogical use of language plays in human thought is a longstanding theme in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, and Ross himself wrote an important book on the subject.  Moreover, to suppose that we have to regard a concept either as having a straightforward literal meaning or as metaphorical is to assume a false dichotomy.  Not all analogy is metaphor, so that a concept can have an analogical but still literal meaning.  (See pp. 256-63 of Scholastic Metaphysics for a brief overview of the Thomistic approach to this subject.)
Third, Ross and other Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers would by no means deny that human cognition is embodied.  On the contrary, Aristotelians and Thomists have always insisted that embodiment is natural to us and to our mode of cognition.  They do not regard a human being as a res cogitans or the body as something to which the human mind is only contingently attached (as Cartesian dualism implies) much less as a kind of prison (as Platonism holds).  Rather, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, a human being is a substance to which both incorporeal and corporeal operations are essential, and the incorporeal ones (intellectual and volitional activity) require certain corporeal ones (namely sensation and imagination) as their natural concomitant.  That is why the title of the article in which Ross first presented his argument is “Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” and the title of my article developing and defending the argument is “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”  And that is also why, though the intellect is incorporeal and thus survives the destruction of the body, it cannot do much on its own.  Death is not a liberation, but (as I have put it elsewhere) something like a “full body amputation” that leaves the human being reduced to an incorporeal stub.  (See the posts linked to below for further discussion.)
However, there is a special way in which contemporary thinking about embodied cognition might seem at odds with Ross’s argument.  The idea of embodied cognition has in recent years been closely connected with the notion of tacit knowledgeexplored by mid twentieth-century thinkers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ryle, Polanyi, and Hayek, and developed further by more recent writers like John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, and Charles Taylor.  One way to sum up the basic idea is that all conscious and explicit knowing thatsuch-and-such is the case presupposes a background of inexplicit knowing how to cope with the world, where knowing how is a matter of having certain capacities, dispositions, and ways of acting rather than a matter of grasping propositions.  These capacities, dispositions, and ways of acting are in turn largely bodily capacities, dispositions, and ways of acting, so that all of our explicit propositional knowledge ultimately presupposes embodiment.
Now, I have long been highly sympathetic to this line of thought, and have discussed Hayek’s application of it in a few places (here, here, and here).  In fact it represents, I would argue, a rediscovery of an essentially Aristotelian conception of human nature.  (This is a theme I develop in some forthcoming work.)  But it might seem hard to square with Ross.  One of the central theses of writers on tacit knowledge is that it can never in principle all be made explicit.  Even when we make explicit some piece of knowledge that had been inexplicit or tacit, there is always some further body of knowledge that remains inexplicit and exists in the form of dispositions and habits of action rather than propositions.  As Polanyi liked to put it, “we know more than we can tell.”  Conscious and explicit knowledge is like the tip of an iceberg, and no matter how much of the iceberg you bring up above the surface, there is always more that is left underwater. 
Now, if we have knowledge that is never explicit but rather embodied in habits and dispositions, then doesn’t that entail that it is not determinate in the relevant sense, especially insofar as it is embodied and thus sunk in materiality?  And doesn’t that conflict with what Ross says?
It does not conflict with it at all.  For one thing, the precise sense in which inexplicit knowledge of the sort in question might be said to be indeterminate needs careful spelling out.  And it is not clear that it really is indeterminate in the relevant sense.  Suppose you have the thought that it is raining, and when it is raining, traffic is bad, and from that thought draw the conclusion that traffic is bad.  You have reasoned according to the inference rule modus ponens, but suppose you do not realize this because you have never taken a logic class and it has simply never occurred to you to consider that form of reasoning in the abstract, apart from the concrete examples in which you have deployed it.  We might say that your knowledge of modus ponens is in this case tacit or inexplicit, embodied in certain habits or dispositions of thinking and speaking rather than as a proposition or rule you have ever consciously entertained. 
Now suppose you take a logic class and explicitly learn the rule.  You think “Hmm, I’ve always reasoned that way, though I never before really thought about the fact that that is what I was doing.”  You now certainly have a thought with determinate content.  But if what you grasp now is something you recognize as a rule you had always applied in the past, it is hard to see how what you knew in the past, inexplicitly or tacitly, was any less determinate in its content in the relevant sense than is the thought you have now.  It always was the determinate rule modus ponensthat you were applying, even if you weren’t aware of it.  The determinacy of the immaterial intellect arguably seeps down, as it were, into the body, so as to make determinate even tacit knowledge.
But put that aside, because there is a deeper point.  Ross never says in the first place that every single thought we ever have is entirely determinate in its content in the relevant sense, and he doesn’t need to say that in order to make his argument.  All he needs is the premise that some thought is determinate in its content.  So, even if we were to concede that inexplicit or tacit knowledge is indeterminate, that would not affect Ross’s argument, because all he needs is the claim that some of our explicit thought is determinate in its content.
This objection to Ross would also seem once again betray a failure to understand the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of human nature and how it differs from other conceptions.  If a human being were an angel or a Cartesian res cogitans, then perhaps we would be able to say that everything we know we know explicitly and that all of our mental states and processes are entirely determinate in their content in the relevant sense.  If a human being were entirely corporeal, as a non-human animal is, then we would be devoid of strictly intellectual activity and thus it could be said that everything we know we know only tacitly or inexplicitly and that none of our mental states and processes (i.e. sub-intellectual exercises in perception and imagination) has any determinate conceptual content in the relevant sense.  But neither of these scenarios holds.  In fact, human beings straddle the divide between the purely incorporeal and the purely corporeal, having one foot in the angelic realm and one foot in the animal realm.  Hence we are mixtures of the determinate and indeterminate, the explicit and the tacit.  And that we have at least some determinate mental content is all Ross needs for his argument.
FURTHER READING:
What is a soul?
Some questions on the soul, Part I
Some questions on the soul, Part II
Was Aquinas a dualist?
Was Aquinas a materialist?
So, what are you doing after your funeral?
Mind-body interaction: What’s the problem?
Progressive dematerialization

Revisiting Ross on the immateriality of thought

The late James Ross put forward a powerful argument for the immateriality of the intellect.  I developed and defended this argument in my essay “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought,”which originally appeared in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly and is reprinted in Neo-Scholastic Essays .  Peter Dillard raises three objections to my essay in his ACPQarticle “Ross Revisited: Reply to Feser.”  Let’s take a look.Ross’s argument

Before doing so, let me summarize Ross’s argument.  The basic idea can be put in the form of the following syllogism:
1. All formal thinking is determinate.2. No physical process is determinate. 
3. Thus, no formal thinking is a physical process.

Naturally, the significance and justification of the premises of this syllogism need spelling out.  I do that at length in my ACPQ essay, and readers who have not read it might want to do so before proceeding here.  For present purposes I will merely review some key points.
First, for those totally unfamiliar with this debate it might be necessary to point out that the determinacy and indeterminacy in question have nothing at all to do with causal determinism, quantum mechanics, free will, etc.  They have instead to do with the semantic determinacy and indeterminacy in view in some famous twentieth-century philosophical thought experiments like W. V. Quine’s “gavagai” example from Word and Object and Saul Kripke’s “quus” example from Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. 
Something is “determinate” in the sense in question here if there is an objective fact of the matter about whether it has one rather than another of a possible range of meanings – that is to say, if it has a meaning or semantic content that is exact, precise, or unambiguous.  It is “indeterminate” if it does not, that is to say, if there is no objective fact of the matter about which of the alternative possible meanings or contents it possesses.
Now, Ross argues, first, that at least some of our thoughts and thought processes do have a content that is entirely determinate or exact.  The sort of thinking involved in mathematics and formal logic is the example on which he focuses.  There can, for instance, be an objective fact of the matter that I am adding, specifically, or reasoning according to the inference rule modus ponens. 
To deny that any of our thoughts has any determinate content, argues Ross, would be not only bizarre but incoherent.  For example, you have unambiguously to grasp what it is to add or to apply modus ponens in the very act of denying that we ever unambiguously grasp what it is to add or apply modus ponens.  You have unambiguously to apply formal rules of inference in the very act of giving an argument for the conclusion that we never unambiguously apply any formal rules of inference.
In defending the second premise, according to which no physical process is determinate in the relevant sense, Ross makes special use of Kripke’s “quus” example.  Kripke defines the “quus” function as follows:
x quus y = x + y, if x, y < 57;               = 5 otherwise.

When carrying out addition, 2 and 2 will give you 4, 52 and 3 will give you 55, and 68 and 100 will give 168.  But when carrying out “quaddition,” though 2 and 2 will still give you 4, and 52 and 3 will still give you 55, 68 and 100 will give you 5. 
Now, suppose you had never added using any numbers higher than 57.  Then all the past behavior you exhibited when it seemed that you were adding would be equally consistent with the hypothesis that you were really quadding rather than adding.  Of course, most people have added using numbers larger than that.  But we could always define quaddition instead using some number higher than 57.  For example, we could use the number 3,998,702, and for any number we chose there would always be some higher number we could choose instead.  Hence we could always define “quaddition” in such a way that for anyone who has ever apparently been adding, the behavior he exhibited in doing so would be equally consistent with the hypothesis that he was really quadding.
Of course, we would all say that, even if our outward behavior is consistent with this weird “quadding” hypothesis, we know that we have always really been adding and not quadding.  But this is where Kripke introduces a famous skeptical scenario.  First of all, anything we say about the way we use symbols like “+” and words like “plus” can be said about anyword.  Just as some person you are observing might in fact be quadding rather than adding when he speaks or writes sentences like “Two plus two equals four,” so too, when he says things like “Oh, I’m really adding and not ‘quadding,’ whatever that is!” what he might really mean, for all you know, is that he is quadding rather than adding.  It might be that every utterance he makes can be given an alternative interpretation in a way that is consistent with the hypothesis that he is using quaddition rather than addition.
But second, what is true of our interpretation of the words and behavior of other people is (so the argument goes) true also of our interpretation of our own words and behavior.  Maybe you have yourself always been quadding rather than adding.  And if you say “But sometimes I have just entertained the sentence ‘I am really adding and not quadding’ within the privacy of my own mind rather than speaking or writing it,” the trouble is that that sentence, which you only entertained mentally, might really have the meaning that you were actually quadding and not adding.  So, Kripke’s imagined skeptic says, you can never really know what anyone’s words mean, not even your own.  Every linguistic expression, whether spoken or written or even just existing in the form of mental imagery, is indeterminate in meaning or semantic content.
Nor, if mental imagery along with speaking, writing, and other bodily behavior, is all there is that could determine semantic content, is this merely an epistemological result but also a metaphysical result.  It’s not just that you couldn’t know what you or anyone else really means.  It’s that there would be no objective fact of the matter at all about what you or anyone else really means.
Now, Ross adapts Kripke’s example to his own purposes.  He argues that if all the facts there are to go on are the physical facts, then Kripke’s imagined skeptic would be right.  There would be no determinate meaning at all, no fact of the matter about the semantic content of what anyone ever says or thinks.  Material or physical processes are inherently indeterminate in precisely the way Kripke’s example describes.  But, again, formal thought processes do in fact have a determinate content.  Hence formal thought processes cannot be material or physical.  (As I argue at length in my essay, the way to see how this is possible given what Kripke says about mental imagery and the like is sharply to distinguish between intellect on the one hand and imaginationand sensation on the other, i.e. between strictly conceptual thought and the mere having of sensations, mental pictures, auditory imagery, and so forth.)
A lot more could be said, and I say it in the essay.  So if there is some point in the argument you don’t understand or some objection you think hasn’t been considered, give the essay a read, because I think you’ll find I address it there.  But this summary should suffice to provide context for my discussion of Dillard’s objections.
Metaphysics or just epistemology?
According to Dillard’s first objection, Ross is not in fact entitled to a metaphysical conclusion, but only an epistemological one.  In particular, the most Ross can say is that you cannot know from the physical facts what you or anyone else means.  But it doesn’t follow that the physical facts don’t suffice to make it the case that our thoughts and utterances actually have some determinate meaning.  For all Ross has shown, maybe our thoughts are purely physical but nevertheless do have some determinate meaning, even if we can’t know what that meaning is.  Hence (Dillard concludes) Ross hasn’t really established that formal thinking is not physical.
Dillard defends this claim by appealing to what he takes to be a parallel example.  Consider the mitosis that a cell undergoes, and an imaginary Kripke-style parallel process which Dillard labels “schmitosis.”  Schmitosis is just like mitosis, except that:
“[S]chmitosis”… yields nuclei containing an exact copy of the parental nucleus’s chromosomes for the first 10ncell divisions but an entirely different set of chromosomes for any cell divisions > 10n. No matter how many mitotic divisions the cells undergo, their behavior will also conform to an incompatible, non-mitotic process. (p. 140)
What we’ve got here, Dillard suggests, is a scenario in which it is indeterminate from the lower-level physical facts whether a cell is undergoing mitosis or schmitosis.  But it doesn’t follow that there is no objective fact of the matter about whether a cell is really undergoing mitosis, and it doesn’t follow that, if there is a fact of the matter, something non-physical is happening here.  What we should say instead, in Dillard’s view, is that mitosis is irreducible to the lower-level physical facts, but is still itself physical. 
Now, so far I am happy to agree with what Dillard says, at least for the sake of argument.  Indeed, though he doesn’t put it this way, he is essentially making a very Aristotelian claim.  For it is part of the Aristotelian theory of substantial form that a true substance has properties and causal powers that are irreducible to those of its parts.  And that has nothing essentially to do with immateriality.  The causal powers and properties of a dog or a tree are irreducible to those of their parts, but a dog and a tree are still purely material substances.  The causal powers and properties of water are irreducible to those of a mere aggregate of distinct parcels of hydrogen and oxygen, but water is still a purely material substance.  And so forth.
So, if so far Dillard has made a point that an Aristotelian like Ross or me would agree with, how is it supposed to pose a problem for Ross’s argument?  The answer is that the irreducibility of mitosis to lower-level physical facts has, Dillard evidently thinks, only epistemological rather than metaphysical significance.  And this in his view supports the judgment that the indeterminacy of meaning too has only epistemological significance.  Just as mitosis is a purely material process even if irreducible to lower-level physical facts, so too might formal thinking be purely material even if its content is indeterminate from the physical facts.
But Dillard is making two mistakes here.  The first is in supposing, without argument, that irreducibility has only epistemological significance.  He seems to think that if a higher-level feature is physical despite being irreducible to lower-level physical features, then the gap between the levels cannot in any way be metaphysical and thus must be epistemological.  But the Aristotelian hylemorphist denies that.  There are, on the Aristotelian view, metaphysical gaps within the material world itself and not just between the material and the immaterial.  For example, there are the traditional Aristotelian distinctions between the inorganic and the organic and between merely vegetative and animal forms of life.  So, unless he provides some argument for the supposition he is making, Dillard is here begging the question against the Aristotelian.  (My fellow Thomists will take note that for ease of exposition I am here using the term “metaphysical” in the broad sense in which it is typically used by contemporary analytic philosophers, not the narrower sense in which it is traditionally used by Thomists.)
More importantly, the issue doesn’t really have anything to do with irreducibility per se in the first place.  Dillard is essentially conflating questions about indeterminacy and questions about irreducibility, and thereby misunderstanding Ross’s argument.  Ross isn’t arguing that thought is irreducible and therefore immaterial.  Again, as an Aristotelian he would not make such an inference.  Rather, he is arguing that thought has a determinate semantic content and is therefore immaterial.  So, the mitosis/schmitosis example is simply not relevantly parallel to Ross’s examples, because there is no semantic content involved in mitosis. 
In developing his objection against Ross, Dillard makes some further mistakes.  He attributes to me the thesis that “forms do not actually exist in the material world but only as idealized universals abstracted by the human intellect” (p. 141), and on the basis of this attribution also attributes to me an odd view about causal powers.  But I have never said any such thing, and that is not my view at all.  Take the substantial form of Socrates.  It exists in Socrates himself, and since it is the ground of his causal powers, that ground also exists in Socrates himself.  Something similar can be said about the substantial form of Aristotle.  Now consider the form humanness.  Unlike the substantial forms of Socrates and of Aristotle, this is a universal.  And it is qua universal that this form exists only as abstracted by the intellect from Socrates, Aristotle, and other particular human beings.  Dillard seems to be confusing (what I said about) the Aristotelian account of universals with an account of the ontological status of forms in general.
Dillard is also, I think, insufficiently attentive to the implications of the Aristotelian distinction between genuine substances and artifacts, but since this seems to be tangential to the main point of his first objection (and the relevant remarks are largely confined to a footnote), I won’t pursue the matter here.  Readers interested in that distinction, and in the notion of substantial form and the other key components of hylemorphism, are directed to chapter 3 of my book Scholastic Metaphysics . 
Incoherence?
Dillard’s second objection questions Ross’s claim that it is incoherent to deny that our thoughts ever have any determinate content.  Here Dillard makes two main points.  First, he notes that a Quinean naturalist would express the claims to which he is committed in terms of a formal language, and in summarizing how this would go Dillard speaks of what he calls the “L-sentences” of such a language.  Dillard then says:
Whether an L-sentence is logically valid or whether an L-sentence is a logical consequence of other L-sentences has nothing to do with whether there are determinate facts about human thinking, any more than whether ferns in the Smoky Mountains are undergoing photosynthesis has anything to do with determinate facts about Tasmanian devils. (p. 144)
Now, Dillard’s point here, as far as I can tell, is that whether an argument in such a formal language is valid or not is just an objective fact that has nothing to do with what anyone thinks about it.  Hence the determinacy or indeterminacy of human thought is irrelevant. 
But if this is what Dillard is saying, then it seems to me that he is simply missing Ross’s point.  The question isn’t whether there might still, as a matter of objective fact, be logical connections between propositions even if human thought was material (if we understand these objective facts in Platonic terms, say).  The question is whether human thought could ever get in contact with these facts.  And what Quinean and Kripkean indeterminacy arguments entail, Ross argues, is that human thought could not do so if it were material.  For while there might still in that case be a fact of the matter about whether modus ponens is objectively a valid form of inference, there would be no fact of the matter about whether anyone’s thoughts actually conform to modus ponens or to some other, invalid inference form instead.  And that’sthe sort of result that generates the incoherence Ross is talking about.
Dillard’s second move here is to appeal to the “skeptical solutions” naturalist philosophers have proposed to deal with indeterminacy puzzles like Kripke’s and Quine’s.  He puts particular emphasis on the Quinean idea that we can take others to mean the same thing we do when our utterances don’t produce in them “bizarreness reactions” like blank stares, eye-rolling, puzzled looks, etc.  Writes Dillard:
The austere naturalist grants that we can be said to assert, mean, and understand things in the minimal sense that our utterances and inscriptions which either contain the relevant expressions or are made in response to others’ utterances and inscriptions containing them do not provoke bizarreness reactions. (p. 144)
As far as I can tell, what Dillard is saying here is that as long as your utterances don’t produce such “bizarreness reactions” in others, then, the materialist can argue, you can be said to be adding, applying modus ponens, etc., and the indeterminacy problem is thereby solved.  Hence the incoherence problem won’t arise. 
But there are several problems with this proposal.  First, we need to distinguish (a) the thesis that there is no objective fact of the matter about what anyone means, from (b) attempts to deal with the practical problems this thesis generates by way of appealing to the absence of “bizarreness reactions” or the like.  Now, what Dillard seems to be saying is that a materialist could hold that as long as we have (b), then we needn’t worry about the practical problems posed by (a).  But this completely misses Ross’s point.  Ross is not saying that (a) could in principle be true but that it would pose intractable practical problems for the materialist – in which case the materialist’s appeal to (b) would be to the point.  Rather, Ross is saying that (a) is incoherent and cannot in principle be true, so that we never even get to the stage of having to deal with indeterminacy problems by appealing to bizarreness reactions, etc. 
(Of course, Ross allows that there would be no fact of the matter about what anyone means if human thought were material.  But he does not grant that there might in principle be no fact of the matter about what anyone means full stop.  He thinks there is and must be a fact of the matter, which is why human thought has to be immaterial.) 
Another problem is that the very idea that the absence of “bizarreness reactions” suffices to solve the indeterminacy problem is simply a non-starter, for several reasons.  For one thing, the absence of bizarreness reactions in others is neither necessary nor sufficient for one’s reasoning to count as conforming to a valid logical form.  As all logic teachers know, if you present an argument like the following to beginning students:
Either 2 + 2 = 5 or the sky is blue.It is not true that 2 + 2 = 5.
Therefore, the sky is blue.

that will certainly produce “bizarreness reactions” in them.  They will think it a very odd way to speak, and they may even go so far as to say that it is not a logical way to speak.  But of course, in fact it is a perfectly valid and even sound argument of the logical form disjunctive syllogism.  Arguments that are not sound but still valid also provoke bizarreness reactions in people.  If you say:
If the sky is green, then water is flammable.The sky is green.
Therefore, water is flammable.

you will once again provoke  bizarreness reactions in beginning students, and it takes a little effort to explain why, for all its obvious faults, this is at least a valid argument in the sense in which the word “valid” is used in logic.
You can also say and do things that do not produce bizarreness reactions in others, yet do not amount to logical reasoning.  For example, if you give an argument like the following:
If it is raining, then the streets are wet.The streets are wet.
Therefore, it is raining.

many will nod approvingly and think it in no way bizarre.  But in fact it is an argument of the invalid form affirming the consequent.  And it would remain invalid even if you somehow got all logicians to start agreeing with it.  Furthermore, we say and do all sorts of other things that do not produce bizarreness reactions in others – walking, yawning, saying “Have a nice day,” etc. – but which do not amount to valid forms of reasoning, precisely because they don’t involve reasoning of any sort at all.
Then there is the fact that what the Quinean calls “bizarreness reactions” are themselves just as indeterminate in their significance as any utterance is.  For example, it is no good to say: “The looks people give me when I say that two and two make four don’t seem to express puzzlement; therefore I must be adding and not quadding.”  For just as the Kripkean skeptic can always ask: “But what do you or anyone else really mean when you use words like ‘plus,’ ‘add,’ etc.?” so too can he ask: “But what do you or anyone else really mean when you smile, nod, stare blankly, grimace, etc.?”   The Quinean appeal to “bizarreness reactions” doesn’t solve the indeterminacy problem at all, but merely pushes it back a further stage.
Skepticism about other minds?
Dillard’s third objection is that if thought processes are immaterial, but all we ever observe of other people are their bodies and behavior, then we could never know the meaning of anyone else’s thoughts.  “Ross’s immaterialism appears to open up an unbridgeable gulf between thinking and behavior,” says Dillard (p. 145).
But there are several problems with this objection.  First, what Dillard is raising here is just a variation on the traditional “problem of other minds.”  And it is difficult to see why Dillard thinks this is a special problem for Ross.  It can be and often is presented as a problem whatever one’s view about the metaphysics of mind, whether dualist or materialist.  For on either view there is arguably at least an epistemological gap between bodily and physiological facts on the one hand and facts about the mind on the other. 
This would be especially true of the non-reductive form of naturalism that Dillard pits against Ross.  As we saw above, in his first objection against Ross, Dillard suggests that the meaning of our thoughts might still be physical even if it could not be inferred from physical facts about behavior, brain activity, etc.  He claimed, contra Ross, that this has only epistemological rather than metaphysical significance.  But in that case Dillard himself is affirming an epistemological gap between thinking and behavior that poses just the sort of problem he thinks Ross’s position lands Ross in.
So, again, there is nothing about Ross’s position that raises the problem of other minds in a unique way.
Second, it would be rather absurd for a materialist who accepts Quinean or Kripkean indeterminacy results to raise this sort of objection against Ross.  Ross could respond: “At least given my view there is a fact of the matter about what a person means, even if one could not know what that meaning is except in one’s own case.  But if materialism were true, we couldn’t say even that much.  There would be no fact of the matter at all, not just a fact of the matter that we couldn’t know about.”
Dillard also suggests that Ross’s position no less than anyone else’s faces “private language” problems of the sort Wittgenstein raised in Philosophical Investigations.  He says that the “sui generisacts of thinking” entailed by Ross’s argument (for an explanation of which, see my article) would be problematic as purported anchors of meaning even in the first-person case, in just the way Wittgenstein says that sensations and behavior are problematic even in the first-person case.  To be sure, Dillard seems to allow that Ross’s “sui generis acts of thinking” would suffice to determine the content of the thoughts I am having here and now.  But he thinks they would not suffice to tell me what the true content of my past thoughts was.  He writes:
But since my earlier behavior associated with the “+” sign does not determine whether I was actually adding as opposed to quadding or even thinking of nothing at all, I also have no idea whether yesterday I was adding, quadding, or thinking of nothing at all. (p. 146)
But there are two problems with Dillard’s argument here.  First, it is not at all clear whyhe thinks that Ross’s “sui generisacts of thinking” would suffice to determine meaning in the first-person case here and now, but nevertheless would notsuffice to determine what I meant in the past.  For, contrary to what Dillard says in the sentence just quoted, I don’t have merely my memory of past behavior to go on.  I also have my memory of these past sui generis acts.  And if present sui generis acts suffice to determine the content of what I am thinking now, why don’t past sui generisacts suffice to determine the content of what I was thinking then?  (True, in theory I could be forgetting what past sui generis acts of thought I actually engaged in.  But that’s a different problem, merely a special case of the more general question of how I can know memory is reliable.  It has nothing to do with Ross’s account, specifically.)
The second problem with Dillard’s objection is that (depending on how one reads him) he may be overlooking the crucial difference between sensations, behavior, etc. on the one hand and Ross’s “sui generis acts of thinking” on the other.  As I explained in my original article, with sensations, behavior, etc., there is a gap in principle between the sensation or behavior itself on the one hand, and whatever semantic content it is associated with on the other.  But with the sui generis acts of thinking, there is no such gap.  The thought just is its content.  Now it is the gap that exists in the former case that is essential to the sorts of problems Wittgenstein raises.  But since the gap doesn’t exist in the case of sui generis thoughts, the problems in question don’t apply to them.
In any event, Dillard undermines this entire third criticism of his when, on the last page of his article (p. 147), he endorses Paul Ziff’s solution to the question of how one can know what another is thinking.  I will let the reader read and evaluate that solution for himself, because the details don’t matter for the point I want to make about it.  And that point is that if Ziff’s solution is correct, then it shows why Ross’s position no more faces a “problem of other minds” than does the sort of view Dillard would favor.  In which case it is not clear why Dillard even bothers to raise his third objection against Ross.  Again, the problem of other minds is simply not more of a problem for Ross than it is for anyone else.
Not that I think it really is a problem.  The so-called “problem of other minds” rests on the presupposition that “zombies” (in the philosophy of mind sense of that term) are in principle possible, and I do not think they are possible.  But that is a topic for another time (and one I addressed in another post).
Anyway, I thank Dillard for his article and apologize for not responding to it earlier.  I had originally planned to do so in the context of an ACPQ article, but given the various book projects and other commitments that have taken up so much of my time over the last couple of years, I kept putting that article on the back burner.  Since it now seems a little late in the day for an ACPQ response, I decided to respond in a blog post.
FURTHER READING:
Earlier posts on topics related to those discussed in this post include:
Kripke contra computationalism
Augustine on semantic indeterminacy
Da Ya Think I’m Sphexy?
Zombies: A Shopper’s Guide
Progressive dematerialization
Mind-body problem roundup
Longtime readers will also recall an exchange I had a few years back with physicist Robert Oerter on the subject of Ross’s argument.  The relevant posts are:
Oerter and the indeterminacy of the physical
Oerter on indeterminacy and the unknown
Do machines compute functions?
Can machines beg the question?
Finally, ideas and arguments related to the issues discussed in this post are addressed in my article “From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature,” which appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Nova et Vetera.

Forthcoming speaking engagements

The Thomistic Institute and St. Thomas Aquinas Parish at the University of Virginia are co-sponsoring a day of lectures on natural theology on Saturday, January 28.  The speakers are Edward Feser and Fr. James Brent.  Details hereand here.
I will be giving the Cardinal Stafford Lectures at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, CO this March 22.  Details forthcoming.
Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY will be hosting the Seventh Annual Philosophy Workshop from June 29 - July 2, on the theme Aquinas on Metaphysics.  The speakers will be James Brent, OP, Michael Gorman, Jeffrey Brower, Candace Vogler, Edward Feser, John O’Callaghan, Alfred Freddoso, and Steven Long.

More on Amoris

Invoking Amoris Laetitia, the bishops of Malta have decreed that adulterers who feel “at peace with God” and find it “humanly impossible” to refrain from sex may receive absolution and go to communion.  Their declaration is published in the Vatican’s own newspaper. 
Canon lawyer Edward Peters judges the Malta situation a “disaster”that makes it “urgent” that the four cardinals’ dubia be answered either by Pope Francis or Cardinal Müller.  Cardinal Caffarra says that “only a blind man” could deny that the Church is in crisis.  Philosopher Joseph Shaw judges thatthe crisis “is truly separating the men from the boys.”
The man and the theology behind Amoris:  At Crux, philosopher Michael Pakaluk uncovers the depth of the influence of papal advisor and ghostwriter Archbishop Victor Fernandez.
Puzzled by how these developments can be squared with orthodoxy?  Another papal advisor, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, explains that in theology, 2 and 2 sometimes make 5. 
Ed Peters on how papal defender Austen Ivereigh misrepresents canon law.
Edward Pentin reports that the CDF under Cardinal Müller had urged a large number of corrections to Amoris before publication – not one of which was accepted.  The Catholic Herald describes the difficult position of Cardinal Müller. 
Cardinal Napier asks: If adulterers can receive communion, why not polygamists?  And is Amorisonly the beginning?  Msgr. Nicola Bux foresees “blasphemy and sacrilege” in the move toward intercommunion with non-Catholics.
Moral theologian Fr. George Woodall also judges the need for an answer to the dubia “urgent.”  At Catholic World Report, theologian Fr. Mark Pilon foresees a “moral and pastoral crisis.”  A Dominican theologian questions the purportedly “Thomistic” character of the teaching of Amoris.
Ambiguity?  In Amoris maybe, but, historically speaking, none whatsoever in Catholic teaching on divorce and remarriage.  The unbroken tradition is set out at Crisisby Professor Donald Prudlo. 
What’s ahead in 2017?  Cardinal Burke indicates that a “formal correction” of the pope could come early in the year, but says that he does not accuse the pope of heresy.    
Burke reports that the four cardinals who have come out publicly are not the only ones who support the dubia.  The cardinal says he is more concerned about the Last Judgment than about losing his rank. 
Fr. Raymond de Souza foresees a year “of greater acrimony and division.”  Damian Thompson reports that “more and more priests can’t stand Pope Francis.”  The Spectator Australia says that Francis is alienating conservatives and progressives alike.
John Allen reports that Pope Francis, who “accus[es] some of [his] critics of doing the devil’s work,” shows no signs of wanting to heal the rift.  According to Der Spiegel, the pope has speculated that he might “enter history as the one who split the Catholic Church.” 
I have nothing to add to all this at the moment except a link to my own analysis of the Amoris controversy.

Addison’s disease (Updated)

Addison Hodges Hart is a Christian author, former Catholic priest, and the brother of theologian David Bentley Hart.  (From here on out I’ll refer to David and Addison by their first names, simply for ease of reference rather than by way of presuming any familiarity.)  A reader calls my attention to the Fans of David Bentley Hartpage at Facebook, wherein Addison takes issue with my recent article criticizing his brother’s universalism.  His loyalty to his brother is admirable.   The substance of his response, not so much.  Non-existent, in fact.  For Addison has nothing whatsoever to say in reply to the content of my criticisms.  Evidently, it is their very existence that irks him.Addison confesses an interest in my “motives” for criticizing his brother’s views.  Well, that’s easy to explain.  People have been asking me to comment on David’s article ever since it appeared.  David is a very prominent figure in Christian theology, and the position he defends is, in my view and that of many other Christians, seriously misguided.  So, I judged it worthwhile to respond to him.  The fact that I had recently written up a series of posts on the doctrine of hell made it a fitting time to do so.  And there you have it.

But it seems that this rather mundane academic and theological motivation does not constitute a good enough explanation for Addison.  No, he is convinced that there must be something deeper going on.  Since I’m still on winter break and can afford to waste the time, I decided to scroll through David’s Facebook fan page to find out what my true motivations are.  Turns out that Addison’s proposal is that I am “obsessed” and “hung up” on his brother, regard him as a “threat,” and that it is to this “loopy” “fixation” of mine on David that one must look to find the true impetus behind my recent article.  It also turns out that Addison has as of Thursday afternoon devoted, by my count, no fewer than seven posts across two Facebook discussion threads over the last couple of days to developing this theme.
I suppose I should add at this point that, yes, Addison is a grown man, and not a thirteen year old girl with a new iPod.  Needless to say, there is indeed a “fixation” here, and it ain’t mine.
In point of fact, the last time I had anything to say about David was almost a year ago, in a review of his book The Experience of God that appeared in Pro Ecclesia.  And what sort of obsessive, loopy nastiness did I there fling at him?  Why, stinging barbs like this:
David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God has gotten a lot of praise, and deservedly, because it is a good book.  Hart is very smart, enormously well read, writes elegantly, is unafraid to question academic orthodoxy, and has a feel for where the deepest issues lie in the contemporary dispute between theism and atheism.
End quote.  And then there was that time when my mean-spirited fixation on David led me to defend him against Jerry Coyne. 
To be sure, I have indeed also been hard on David from time to time.  The last time was over a year and a half ago, in a couple of articles in which I was merely responding to a vituperative piece David had written about me in First Things.  Indeed, inevery single case in which I have had harsh words for David, it has only ever been in response to polemical remarks he had made either about me personally or about Thomists in general.  David, after all, is no shrinking violet.  He can dish it out with tremendous gusto.  I have merely kindly tried to give him the opportunity to see whether he can take it as well.  Iron sharpening iron and all that.
In any event, after our most recent contretemps David and I had, it seemed to me, buried the hatchet.  I have no desire to dig it up again, and my recent piece on David’s universalism, though frank in its criticisms, is not abusive at all.  So whatever retaliatory snark I have directed David’s way in the past is irrelevant.
I will say this much for Addison.  His behavior is not as juvenile as that of many of his fellow commenters.  Here’s a sample of the other shrewd rejoinders to my arguments, generated by the brain trust that is the Fans of David Bentley Hart Facebook page:
Thomists pounding the head of a pin into its constituent atoms. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Until Feser agree's to take the Voight-Kampff test I will continue to assume he is a google AI algorithm, but at least he uses his enormous data processing abilities to fight Pope Francis's pagan proclamations of mercy by defending the Sates right to kill bad people in his upcoming book.
I don't think anyone here speculated about hidden motivations even though it's obvious Feser has a pathological psycho-sexual fetish for David and spends his nights writing Thomistic erotic fan fiction about him.
hey, lets' have some more respect for the philosophy teacher at the third most prestigious community college in los angeles county.
Etc. etc.
Back during our last exchange, David gently had to advise some of his more overenthusiastic admirers against “trading insults, and not very witty ones.”  Seems the Facebook guys didn’t get the memo.
I know what you’re thinking.  Sure, this kind of stuff is mildly annoying, but why call attention to it?  Isn’t it better ignored?
Absolutely, except for this:  When otherwise intelligent and educated people respond to rational arguments against their position, not with counterarguments but rather with the kind of stuff quoted above, one does rather suspect that that’s because that’s the best they’ve got.  And that’s well worth calling attention to.

UPDATE 1/13: In the combox below, Addison Hart and David Hart respond, and I reply to their responses. 

Addison’s disease

Addison Hodges Hart is a Christian author, former Catholic priest, and the brother of theologian David Bentley Hart.  (From here on out I’ll refer to David and Addison by their first names, simply for ease of reference rather than by way of presuming any familiarity.)  A reader calls my attention to the Fans of David Bentley Hartpage at Facebook, wherein Addison takes issue with my recent article criticizing his brother’s universalism.  His loyalty to his brother is admirable.   The substance of his response, not so much.  Non-existent, in fact.  For Addison has nothing whatsoever to say in reply to the content of my criticisms.  Evidently, it is their very existence that irks him.Addison confesses an interest in my “motives” for criticizing his brother’s views.  Well, that’s easy to explain.  People have been asking me to comment on David’s article ever since it appeared.  David is a very prominent figure in Christian theology, and the position he defends is, in my view and that of many other Christians, seriously misguided.  So, I judged it worthwhile to respond to him.  The fact that I had recently written up a series of posts on the doctrine of hell made it a fitting time to do so.  And there you have it.

But it seems that this rather mundane academic and theological motivation does not constitute a good enough explanation for Addison.  No, he is convinced that there must be something deeper going on.  Since I’m still on winter break and can afford to waste the time, I decided to scroll through David’s Facebook fan page to find out what my true motivations are.  Turns out that Addison’s proposal is that I am “obsessed” and “hung up” on his brother, regard him as a “threat,” and that it is to this “loopy” “fixation” of mine on David that one must look to find the true impetus behind my recent article.  It also turns out that Addison has as of Thursday afternoon devoted, by my count, no fewer than seven posts across two Facebook discussion threads over the last couple of days to developing this theme.
I suppose I should add at this point that, yes, Addison is a grown man, and not a thirteen year old girl with a new iPod.  Needless to say, there is indeed a “fixation” here, and it ain’t mine.
In point of fact, the last time I had anything to say about David was almost a year ago, in a review of his book The Experience of God that appeared in Pro Ecclesia.  And what sort of obsessive, loopy nastiness did I there fling at him?  Why, stinging barbs like this:
David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God has gotten a lot of praise, and deservedly, because it is a good book.  Hart is very smart, enormously well read, writes elegantly, is unafraid to question academic orthodoxy, and has a feel for where the deepest issues lie in the contemporary dispute between theism and atheism.
End quote.  And then there was that time when my mean-spirited fixation on David led me to defend him against Jerry Coyne. 
To be sure, I have indeed also been hard on David from time to time.  The last time was over a year and a half ago, in a couple of articles in which I was merely responding to a vituperative piece David had written about me in First Things.  Indeed, inevery single case in which I have had harsh words for David, it has only ever been in response to polemical remarks he had made either about me personally or about Thomists in general.  David, after all, is no shrinking violet.  He can dish it out with tremendous gusto.  I have merely kindly tried to give him the opportunity to see whether he can take it as well.  Iron sharpening iron and all that.
In any event, after our most recent contretemps David and I had, it seemed to me, buried the hatchet.  I have no desire to dig it up again, and my recent piece on David’s universalism, though frank in its criticisms, is not abusive at all.  So whatever retaliatory snark I have directed David’s way in the past is irrelevant.
I will say this much for Addison.  His behavior is not as juvenile as that of many of his fellow commenters.  Here’s a sample of the other shrewd rejoinders to my arguments, generated by the brain trust that is the Fans of David Bentley Hart Facebook page:
Thomists pounding the head of a pin into its constituent atoms. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Until Feser agree's to take the Voight-Kampff test I will continue to assume he is a google AI algorithm, but at least he uses his enormous data processing abilities to fight Pope Francis's pagan proclamations of mercy by defending the Sates right to kill bad people in his upcoming book.
I don't think anyone here speculated about hidden motivations even though it's obvious Feser has a pathological psycho-sexual fetish for David and spends his nights writing Thomistic erotic fan fiction about him.
hey, lets' have some more respect for the philosophy teacher at the third most prestigious community college in los angeles county.
Etc. etc.
Back during our last exchange, David gently had to advise some of his more overenthusiastic admirers against “trading insults, and not very witty ones.”  Seems the Facebook guys didn’t get the memo.
I know what you’re thinking.  Sure, this kind of stuff is mildly annoying, but why call attention to it?  Isn’t it better ignored?
Absolutely, except for this:  When otherwise intelligent and educated people respond to rational arguments against their position, not with counterarguments but rather with the kind of stuff quoted above, one does rather suspect that that’s because that’s the best they’ve got.  And that’s well worth calling attention to. 

A Hartless God?

Lest the impatient reader start to think of this as the blog from hell, what follows will be – well, for a while, anyway – my last post on that subject.  Recall that in earlier posts I set out a Thomistic defense of the doctrine of eternal damnation.  In the first, I explained how, on Aquinas’s view, the immortal soul of the person who is damned becomes permanently locked on to evil upon death.  The second post argued that since the person who is damned perpetually wills evil, God perpetually inflicts on that person a proportionate punishment.  The third post explains why the souls of the damned would not be annihilated instead.  In this post I will respond to a critique of the doctrine of eternal damnation put forward by my old sparring partner, Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, in his article “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo” (from the September 2015 issue of Radical Orthodoxy).The central theme of Hart’s article is that the world qua God’s creation is an expression of his perfect goodness and rationality, and that eternal damnation would be incompatible with that perfection.  Of course, defenders of eternal damnation like Aquinas would deny that there is any such incompatibility, for reasons like those set out in my earlier posts.  So, Hart owes us some argumentation in addition to this assertion of incompatibility.  And indeed, he offers (as far as I can see) five lines of argument in defense of his position. 

The arguments are, however, all very sketchy at best rather than carefully worked out, and in my judgment none of them succeeds.  Let’s take a look.
1. To damn one is to damn all
Hart thinks that human beings are interconnected in such a way that no one could possibly enjoy perpetual happiness if others were damned.  He writes:
After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities?  Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us?  We are those others.  To say that the sufferings of the damned will either be clouded from the eyes of the blessed or, worse, increase the pitiless bliss of heaven is also to say that no persons can possibly be saved: for, if the memories of others are removed, or lost, or one’s knowledge of their misery is converted into indifference or, God forbid, into greater beatitude, what then remains of one in one’s last bliss?
Some other being altogether, surely: a spiritual anonymity, a vapid spark of pure intellection, the residue of a soul reduced to no one.  But not a person -- not the person who was.  (p. 9)
Now, one way to read this is as a metaphysical claim to the effect that a human being is literally constituted at least in part by his relationships to other human beings.  For example, what it is for Mike to exist is for Mike to be the husband of Carol, the father of Greg, Marsha, and other children, the grandson of Hank, the good friend of Jim, the employer of Alice, the dutiful employee of Ed, the loyal customer of Sam, and so on.  On this interpretation, these other people are parts of Mike in something like the way his arms and legs are parts of him.  Now, if Mike’s arm or leg was in hell, then Mike himself would be, to that extent at least, in hell.  Hence if any of these other constitutive parts of Mike – Carol, Greg, Marsha, et al. – is damned then Mike himself is, at least to that extent, also damned. 
Read this way, though, Hart’s claim would be obviously false, and indeed absurd.  For of course, Mike existed before he ever met Carol, Jim, Ed, Alice, or Sam, he would continue to exist if Hank or any of these other people died, and so on.  Mike did not gradually come into existence as he met these people, and he doesn’t gradually fade out of existence as they depart or die off.  Mike could even in theory end up as the last man on earth, if there were a nuclear war, a worldwide plague, or the like.  It’s not as if, when the second-to-last man goes out of existence, Mike himself would blink out with him!  Hence it is simply not the case that Mike or any other human being is literallyconstituted by his relations to other people. 
What Hart must have in mind, then, is the idea that our identity is determined by our relationships with others in the looser sense that those relationships play a crucial role in molding one’s character, memories, values, etc.  We could say, for example, that Mike’s understanding of his personal calling in life includes his conception of himself as the husband of Carol, the father of Greg and Marsha, the friend of Jim, etc.  Fulfilling his responsibilities to these others, enjoying their company, being involved in common projects with them, etc. are what give his life the specific meaning and unique satisfactions that it has.  He could have known other people, been born in another country, had another vocation, etc. but these possibilities all seem abstract and alien to him.  Given his actualhistory and the people who have actually played a role in forming his character and memories, he would be unhappy if they were taken away from him. 
Now, a person is indeed formed by his relationships to others in this loose sense.  The trouble is that if this is all that Hart has in mind, then the premise is clearly too weak to support the conclusion that we could not possibly maintain our identities and happiness in heaven unless everyone who played a role in molding our lives is saved along with us.  For people obviously can and do retain their identities and even happiness in the absence of some of the people who have shaped their lives, even if in some cases this is difficult.  It happens all the time.
For example, not everyone who has played a role in forming one’s life remains a part of it in the long term.  Mike is the man he is in part because of the teachers and fellow students he knew in his school days.  But he may seldom if ever think about many of these people, and his life might carry on just as it has, and as happily as it does, even if he never thinks of or hears about them again.  For another thing, people sometimes find their callings in life and achieve happiness precisely by leaving behind a pattern of life and set of relationships that once determined their conceptions of themselves.  For example, imagine that Mike had been a hard-partying musician in his twenties, but two decades later has become a family man and professional who would never want to return to his earlier, hedonistic ways and could no longer relate to the people he then knew even if he still kept in contact with them. 
Of course, it might seem harder to imagine Mike being happy if he never again saw (say) his wife Carol, his son Greg, or his friend Jim.  But suppose it turned out that Carol had been committing adultery with Jim, was stealing from Mike in order to sustain a drug habit, abandoned him and the children to run off with Jim, etc.  Mike might in that case be happier in the future precisely to the extent that he does not think about Carol and Jim.  Or suppose Greg ended up becoming a drug pusher and a murderer, was hardened into bitter ingratitude and hatred toward his father, and they became estranged.  Greg might become so corrupt that Mike might conclude that it is as if Greg were no longer his son.  Here too he might be happier in the future precisely to the extent that he does not think about Greg. 
Even in ordinary life, then, we can think of examples in which the breaking off of relationships with even once close friends and family is consistent with one’s maintaining his basic character and happiness.  Now, what C. S. Lewis called the “great divorce” between the saved and the damned is analogous to this.  As I noted in one of the earlier posts in this series, on the Thomistic account, the good that was in the damned person prior to death drops away, leaving only the soul permanently hardened in evil.  So, the people one knew in this life but will be separated from forever in the afterlife are usefully thought of on the model of the most corrupt people we come across in this life, including even people whose evil has so estranged us from them that once close emotional bonds have been dissolved. 
Now, Hart might concede that these sorts of examples give us a model for understanding how we might be happy in the afterlife even if we no longer then know some of the people we knew in this life.  But he might argue that it still does not follow that we could be happy if those people were not only separated from us forever, but also suffering forever. 
To see what is wrong with this, though, return once again to examples from this life.  Few people are troubled by the fact that mass murderers who are imprisoned for life are to that extent unhappy for the rest of their lives.  The reason is that those who suffer such punishments deservethem.  Similarly, Mike might be untroubled even if Greg goes to jail for life, if he thinks Greg has become so evil that he deserves this.  And if he hears that Carol and Jim have become miserable together in their adulterous relationship, he may well be untroubled by that too, since they deserve that misery. 
By the same token, if those damned forever deserveprecisely that punishment – and in an earlier post I spelled out the standard Thomistic account of how someone could deserve it – then the saved will not be troubled by the fact that the damned suffer that punishment.  Hart might disagree with the claim that they deserve it, but the point is that his argument doesn’t show that they don’t deserve it but at best merely implicitly presupposes that they don’t.  If so, then it simply begs the question.
To sum up, then, this first argument of Hart’s rests on a fatal ambiguity.  His premise that a person’s identity is determined by his relationships to other people can be interpreted in either a literal sense or a loose sense.  If interpreted the first or literal way, then while the premise would support Hart’s conclusion, it is also obviously false.  If interpreted instead in the second or loose way, then while the premise is true, it does not support Hart’s conclusion.  Hart’s argument can appear plausible only if we fail to disambiguate these alternative readings.
2. Hell is incompatible with God’s goodness and rationality
Again, the main theme of Hart’s article is that creation is an expression of God’s goodness and rationality.  He writes:
{T]he only necessity in the divine act of creation is the impossibility of any hindrance upon God’s expression of his goodness… (p. 3)
[T]he doctrine of creation adds… an assurance that in this divine outpouring there is no element of the “irrational”: something purely spontaneous, or organic, or even mechanical, beyond the power of God’s rational freedom.  But then it also means that within the story of creation, viewed from its final cause, there can be no residue of the pardonably tragic, no irrecuperable or irreconcilable remainder left at the end of the tale. (pp. 5-6)
Now, creation would in Hart’s view be neither good nor rational if hell were a part of it.  He expresses this idea in passages like the following:
[T]he eternal suffering… of any soul would be an abominable tragedy, and so a moral evil if even conditionally intended, and could not possibly be comprised within the ends intended by a truly good will (in any sense of the word “good” intelligible to us).  Yet, if both the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and that of eternal damnation are true, that evil is indeed comprised within the intentions and dispositions of God… And what then is God, inasmuch as the moral nature of any intended final cause must include within its calculus what one is willing to sacrifice to achieve that end…? (pp. 11-12)
Let us imagine… that only one soul will perish eternally, and all others enter into the peace of the Kingdom… Let it be someone utterly despicable – say, Hitler.  Even then, no matter how we understand the fate of that single wretched soul in relation to God’s intentions, no account of the divine decision to create out of nothingness can make its propriety morally intelligible.(pp. 12-13)
Let us suppose… that rational creatures possess real autonomy, and that no one goes to hell save by his or her own industry and ingenuity… [L]et us say God created simply on the chance that humanity might sin, and that a certain number of incorrigibly wicked souls might plunge themselves into Tartarus forever; this still means that, morally, he has purchased the revelation of his power in creation by the same horrendous price… Creation could never then be called “good” in an unconditional sense; nor God the “Good as such,” no matter what conditional goods he might accomplish in creating.  (pp. 13-14)
[I]f God does so create, in himself he cannot be the good as such, and creation cannot be a morally meaningful act: it is from one vantage an act of predilective love, but from another – logically necessary – vantage an act of prudential malevolence. (p. 16)
End quote.  Now, I quote these passages rather than summarizing Hart’s argument precisely to demonstrate to the reader that there really isn’t much if anything in the way of actual argumentation here.  Hart repeatedly asserts that hell is incompatible with God’s goodness.  But while he does so with rhetorical flourish, as far as I can tell he never actually provides a rational justification for this claim.  Perhaps he finds it obvious, but since it is not obvious to those among Hart’s fellow Christian theologians who affirm the doctrine of hell – historically, by Hart’s own admission, the majority of Christian theologians – Hart is hardly in a positon to rest his case on mere personal intuition.
Those defenders of hell have also given arguments of their own which purport to show that the reality of hell is compatible with God’s rationality and goodness.  For example, in the three previous posts in this series, I spelled out the Thomistic arguments for this conclusion.  If those arguments succeed, then a person could indeed merit eternal punishment and a perfectly good and rational God not only could but would inflict it.  So, in order for Hart to make his case, he would need to respond to those arguments.  Unfortunately, he says very little in response, and the little he does say is not impressive.  This brings us to his next line of argument:
3. Free will does not justify hell
Hart claims that in order to try to make sense of eternal damnation, it will not suffice to appeal to the idea that the damned have freely chosen their unhappy fate.  He writes:
[The] appeal to creaturely freedom and to God’s respect for its dignity… invariably fails.  It might not do, if one could construct a metaphysics or phenomenology of the will’s liberty that was purely voluntarist, purely spontaneous; though, even then, one would have to explain how an absolutely libertarian act, obedient to no ultimate prior rationale whatsoever, would be distinguishable from sheer chance, or a mindless organic or mechanical impulse, and so any more “free” than an earthquake or embolism.  But, on any cogent account, free will is a power inherently purposive, teleological, primordially oriented toward the good, and shaped by that transcendental appetite to the degree that a soul can recognize the good for what it is.  No one can freely will the evil as evil; one can take the evil for the good. (p. 10)
So, Hart evidently thinks that the conception of free will presupposed by defenses of the doctrine of hell is a voluntarist one on which the will is not inherently ordered toward what the intellect takes to be good.  This is very odd, considering that Aquinas and other Thomists firmly (and rather famously) reject voluntarism and agreewith Hart that the will is inherently ordered toward what the intellect takes to be good.   Yet they also defend the doctrine of hell.  So, Hart’s objection here is aimed at a straw man.
Hart also says:
It makes no more sense to say that God allows creatures to damn themselves out of his love for them or of his respect for their freedom than to say a father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her face into a fire out of a tender respect for her moral autonomy.  And the argument becomes quite insufferable when one considers the personal conditions – ignorance, mortality, defectibility of intellect and will – under which each soul enters the world, and the circumstances – the suffering of all creatures, even the most innocent and delightful of them – with which that world confronts the soul. (p. 10)
Part of the problem with this is that once again, Hart appears to be attacking a straw man.  Defenders of the doctrine of hell – certainly Thomist and Catholic defenders of the doctrine – would not deny that factors such as ignorance, impairments to one’s intellect or to the freedom of one’s will, and the way that suffering can lead to such impairments, are relevant to one’s culpability and thus relevant to whether one is going to be saved or damned.  The traditional criteria for whether a sin is liable to send one to hell (i.e. for a sin’s being mortal) are, first, that the action is gravely wrong; second, that the sinner has full knowledge that what he is doing is wrong; and third, that the sinner acts with sufficient freedom of will.  So, to attack the thesis that someone might be damned even if he acted out of ignorance or if his will is impaired, and even if this ignorance or impairment were due to suffering he has undergone, is to attack something most defenders of the doctrine of hell are not committed to in the first place.
Another problem is that, given these conditions for a sin’s being mortal, Hart’s “deranged child” analogy is a false one.  A child typically lacks the sort of knowledge necessary for mortal sin, and a deranged person lacks the freedom of will necessary for mortal sin.  So, someone who goes to hell is precisely not like a father’s “deranged child.”  A better analogy would be a father’s adult son or daughter who is no longer under the father’s authority and has with full knowledge and deliberate consent chosen a life of evil – like Mike’s son Greg in our earlier example.  And here we would say that a respect for Greg’s “moral autonomy” should lead Mike to allow Greg to suffer the deserved bad consequences of his evil actions (e.g. jail time). 
But Hart would no doubt claim that even this analogy won’t work.  This brings us to his next objection:
4. Hell destroys the analogy between God’s goodness and ours
Aquinas takes the terms we apply to God to be properly understood in an analogical way.  The analogical use of terms is to be contrasted with the univocal and the equivocal uses.  If I say “I can make it to the party” and “I can start the car,” I am using the word “can” univocally or in the same sense.  If I say “I can make it to the party” and “The vegetables came out of a can,” I am using the word “can” equivocally or in completely different senses.  If I say “The battery is out of power” and “I have the power to release you from that obligation,” I am using the word “power” analogically or in a middle ground sort of way.  The power of a battery and the power of a person to release someone from an obligation are so very different that the term is not plausibly thought of as being used univocally.  But the senses are not completely unrelated either, so that the term is not being used equivocally.  Rather, there is something in the power of a person that is analogous to the power of a battery, even if that something is not the same thing that the battery has (e.g. it has nothing to do with electricity).
Again, for Aquinas, when we speak of God as powerful, as good, etc. we are using terms in an analogical way.  We are saying that there is in God something analogous to what we call power in us, something analogous to what we call goodness in us, etc.  It is not the same thing as what we call power or goodness in us (given that, unlike us, God is immaterial, outside time and space, changeless, etc.) but it is not entirely unrelated either.  (Note that the analogical use of terms being spoken of here is not a metaphorical use but a literal use.  A battery literallyhas power and a person literally has the power to release someone from an obligation.  Similarly, God literally has power and goodness, just as we literally have power and goodness, even if -- as with the battery and us -- it is not exactly the same thing that is had in both cases.  Not all analogical language is metaphorical.) 
Now, Hart evidently agrees with this account of theological language.  But he alleges that the doctrine of hell is incompatible with it.  In particular, he thinks that if God damns people to hell, then we are really using terms like “good,” “merciful,” “just,” “loving,” etc. in an equivocal way rather than an analogical way (pp. 6-7 and 11).  Moreover, he claims, “the contagion of this equivocity necessarily consumes theology entirely” (p. 14).  All of the language we use about God will turn out to bear no relation to the meanings it bears when we apply it to us, not even an analogical relationship.  Hence we will be unable to say anything about God at all.
Unfortunately, here too Hart’s position appears to boil down to little more than mere assertion, and a failure to consider much less respond to the arguments of the other side.  Aquinas, after all, champions both the doctrine of analogy and the doctrine of hell.  Moreover, as we have seen in the three earlier posts in this series, he gives detailed arguments for the latter, and these arguments purport to demonstrate the justice and goodness of damning some people to hell.  So, if Hart’s position is to amount to more than mere undefended assertion, he needs to respond to those arguments, and he does not do so.
Consider that when a human being with the authority to do so inflicts on a guilty person a punishment proportionate to the offense, we do not count this as evidence that the former is not really “good,” “merciful,” “just,” “loving,” etc. in anything like the ordinary senses of those terms.  For example, if a judge imposes a longer sentence on a repeat offender than he would on a first-time offender, we don’t think this contrary to justice in the ordinary sense, but rather precisely as an exercise of justice in the ordinary sense.  When a parent finally grounds a teenager who has repeatedly stayed out past his curfew, despite the fact that his parents have shown leniency to him in the past, we don’t think this contrary to their being loving or merciful.  On the contrary, we think it a case where the child has abused his parent’s mercy and love and for that reason is even more deserving of punishment.
Now, as we have seen in the previous posts, Aquinas argues the punishment of hell is perpetual precisely because those who are punished perpetually choose evil and perpetually reject the mercy and love of God.  Their punishment is as proportionate to their offense as the repeat offender’s punishment is proportionate to his offense, and as the teenager’s punishment is proportionate to his.  Properly understood, their punishment supports rather than undermines the analogy between our goodness on the one hand and God’s on the other.  Certainly Hart has said nothing to show otherwise.
(Incidentally, at pp. 7-8 of his article, in the context of his comments about analogy, Hart also makes some highly disparaging remarks about the doctrine of original sin.  This is a large topic, but suffice it for present purposes it to note that Hart directs his fire at the least plausible construal of that doctrine rather than at the most plausible construal.  I gave an exposition of the latter in an earlier post.)
5. Scripture doesn’t really teach eternal damnation 
Since Hart is a Christian theologian who regards scripture as divinely inspired and authoritative, one would expect him to have something to say about those biblical passages which are widely and traditionally understood to teach the doctrine of hell.  And indeed he does.   What he says is that this biblical evidence amounts to:
three deeply ambiguous verses that seem (and only seem) to threaten eternal torments for the wicked.  But that is as may be; every good New Testament scholar is well aware of the obscurities in what we can reconstruct of the eschatological vision of Jesus’s teachings. (p. 15)
That’s it.  Hart does not tell us exactly which passages he has in mind, and he does not explain why those passages do not really teach the doctrine of hell despite the fact that they are typically taken to teach exactly that.
This is very odd, especially coming from Hart.  Longtime readers will recall my exchange with Hart on the topic of whether there will be animals in heaven.  In that context, Hart put great emphasis on scriptural evidence, accused me of ignoring it (which in fact I had not done, as the article linked to shows), and dismissed any non-literal interpretation of passages that seem to imply the presence of fauna in the afterlife.  Yet when the topic is hell, Hart is strangely uninterested in scripture, dismisses in two sentences the biblical evidence against his position on the basis of the undefended assertion that the relevant passages “only seem” to conflict with it, and is apparently suddenly happy to consider non-literal readings.
In fact, contra Hart, the relevant passages are mostly not ambiguous, “deeply” or otherwise, and when one considers passages other than those reporting the words of Christ, there are a lot more than just three of them.  Those most relevant to the eternity of the punishment suffered by the damned are as follows (all quoted from the RSV):
The sinners in Zion are afraid;trembling has seized the godless:
“Who among us can dwell with the devouring fire?
Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?” (Isaiah 33:14)

And they shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched… (Isaiah 66:24)
And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. (Daniel 12:2)
And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. (Matthew 18:8)
Then he will say to those at his left hand, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels…” … And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.  (Matthew 25: 41, 46)
Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed!  It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.  (Matthew 26:24)
[I]t is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire… [I]t is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell,  where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched. (Mark 9:43, 47-48)
They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord.  (2 Thessalonians 1:9)
Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. (Jude 7)
And the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever; and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name. (Revelation 14:11)
 And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. (Revelation 20:10)
Now, there have of course been creative attempts to interpret such passages in a way consistent with universalism or annihilationism.  For example, it is sometimes claimed that the Greek words translated as “everlasting,” “eternal” or “forever” could instead be interpreted as indicating that the punishment in question will last merely for an age or period of long duration, without being strictly endless.  But there are serious problems with such proposals.  For one thing, if the critic of the doctrine of hell were to be consistent in such an interpretation, then he would also have to say that these scriptural passages don’t teach that the reward of the saved will last forever either, but only that it will last for an age or period of long duration.  But if the relevant passages are in fact saying that the reward of the saved lasts forever (as they obviously are), then given the parallelism they employ it is clear that the punishment of the damned lasts forever as well. 
Moreover, the interpretation in question isn’t consistent with other scriptural uses of the relevant Greek terms.  For example, when the Bible speaks of God living forever or having glory forever, it obviously doesn’t mean that God lives or has glory only for an age or period of long duration (1 Timothy 1:17; 2 Timothy 4:18; Galatians 1:5; Revelation 15:7).
It is also very hard to see how Christ could have said that it would have been better for Judas not to have been born if his punishment is only temporary.  If even Judas is destined to be saved eventually, as Hart apparently thinks, then how could it not be better for Judas to have been born?
Another problem is that, whatever a few somewhat later thinkers like Origen thought, the very earliest of the Church Fathers (Polycarp, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, et al.) took the punishment of the damned to be everlasting.  And those who were closest in time to the scriptural authors are in the best possible position to know exactly what those authors meant. 
Like other universalists, Hart puts great emphasis on passages that speak e.g. of God as willing that all be saved (Romans 11:32, 1 Corinthians 15:22, 1 Timothy 2:4, etc.).  The standard universalist move is to suggest that there is a deep tension here with the passages that speak of eternal damnation, and then to suggest that the only way to resolve this is to give the latter a non-literal interpretation.  This way universalism can be sold as a harmonizing defense of scriptural teaching, rather than as a departure from scriptural teaching. 
But the purported tension is bogus.  Consider the following parallel example.  God wills that no one sin.  But obviously it doesn’t follow that no one in fact sins.  On the contrary, people sin constantly, as scripture itself teaches.  It would be ludicrous to suggest that the fact that scripture says that God wills for us not to sin, but also complains that people do in fact sin, shows that there is some deep tension that needs to be resolved.  There is no tension at all because the claims are perfectly consistent.  Given our free will, it is possible for us not to do something that God wills for us to do.  Similarly, that God wills that all be saved simply doesn’t entail that all will in fact be saved, and for the same reason.  Given our free will, we are capable of rejecting the salvation that God wills for all of us.  There is nothing mysterious about this.
It is also odd for people who demand a non-literal interpretation of passages which speak of eternal punishment suddenly to sound like strict literalists when reading a passage like 1 Corinthians 15:22, which says that “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”  For there is simply no reason to read the “all” here as entailing that every single last person will be saved.  “All” and related expressions are sometimes used somewhat loosely, including in scripture.  For example, when Matthew 3:5-6 speaks of John the Baptist going through “all Judea” baptizing, it obviously doesn’t mean that he walked through every single square foot and baptized every single person (e.g. Herod was obviously not baptized by John).  When Hebrews 9:27 says that it is appointed to human beings “once to die,” this doesn’t entail that absolutely everyone dies at most once (since those who have been resurrected, such as Lazarus, have died twice) and it doesn’t entail that absolutely everyone dies even once (since Hebrews 11:5 itself says that Enoch did “not see death”).  Such passages are simply making general claims but without intending to rule out the possibility of exceptions. 
1 Corinthians 15:22 has to be read in the same way.  Indeed, like Hebrews 9:27 it can’t be read as intending to assert that “in Adam” absolutely every single human being dies, given examples like Enoch and Elijah.  By the same token, there is no reason to think the claim that “all” shall be made alive means that every single human being will be saved.  And given that (for all the universalist has shown) there are many scriptural passages that teach eternal damnation, that can’t be what 1 Corinthians 15:22 means. 
But even if someone wants to resist these exegetical claims, Hart has given us no reason to reject them.  Again, like some of his other arguments, the one in question here boils down to little more than sheer assertion.
* * *
Remarkably for someone with a reputation as a champion of orthodoxy (as well as Orthodoxy), Hart suggests that “the God in whom the majority of Christians throughout history have professed belief would appear to be evil” (p. 6).  Lest there be any doubt about how radical is his critique of the tradition, he adds: “Nor am I speaking of a few marginal, eccentric sects within Christian history; I mean the broad mainstream” (p. 7).  The Christian God is heartless, thinks Hart, and needs a transplant.  To accomplish this he proposes constructing the needed organ out of selected scriptural passages and the ideas of what have, historically speaking, been a small minority of Christian thinkers.
Yet in defense of this bold hairesis or “choosing” of one part of the tradition to the exclusion of the other, Hart offers only imprecise claims, begged questions, undefended assertions, straw men, a false analogy, a failure seriously to address scriptural counter-evidence, and in general a reliance on rhetoric rather than careful argumentation.  A cri de coeur perhaps, but hardly an exercise of the rationality he attributes to God and in the name of which he attacks perennial Christian doctrine.